The Gardens Trust 15th New Research Symposium

the Gardens Trust are delighted to introduce the 2025 New Research Symposium, featuring fascinating presentations by four international speakers. On 15th November, join us on a journey from bulb dealing next to Rubens’ Garden in 17th Century Antwerp, to Lady Eggar’s Indian Garden at Alipore, from the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement on the work of Canadian author L. M. Montgomery, to three unofficial memorial gardens to the London Blitz. See full programme below for details - we look forward to seeing you there.

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Tickets for the symposium are free but donations are very welcome!

Go to: https://bit.ly/DonateGardensTrust

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Registration close 4 hours before the event.

Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and a link to the recorded session, available for two weeks, will be sent shortly afterwards.

Image: CC0 public domain

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PROGRAMME FOR SATURDAY 15th NOVEMBER 2-4pm (UK time)

Chair: Dr Louise Crawley, Curator of Garden and Landscape History at English Heritage

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1. Klara Alen: Dealing Bulbs next to Rubens’ Garden - Tulipmania in 17th Century Antwerp

This paper uncovers a forgotten chapter of the tulip craze. In the 1630s, Antwerp fostered its own passion for rare bulbs, centered around the garden of Peter Paul Rubens and a circle of collectors, patrons, and art lovers linked to the Church of Saint George and The Swan Inn. Archival discoveries reveal the varieties they cultivated and show how tulip collecting was woven into networks of trust, reputation, and exchange. This study highlights how tulips connected art, commerce, and horticulture, offering a vivid glimpse into Antwerp’s role in Europe’s early flower culture.

Dr Klara Alen is research curator of the historic garden at the Rubenshuis in Antwerp and researcher for Rubens’ country estate ‘Het Steen’ in Elewijt. She studied art history at the University of Leuven, completed art market studies at VU Amsterdam, and earned her PhD in art history in 2017. Her work explores early still life painting, 17th-century Antwerp horticulture, Rubens’ Garden, Helena Fourment, women artists, and the networks of early modern artists and art dealers. With Sam Segal, she co-authored Dutch and Flemish Flower Pieces (Brill, 2020). Her latest book, Rubens’ Garden. A Masterpiece in Bloom (Hannibal, 2024), uncovers new archival sources and brings to life the flowers, plants, and stories that shaped Rubens’ world.

Image: Peter Paul Rubens, Helena Fourment and Their Son Nicolaas Walking in Their Garden (‘The Walk in the Garden’), detail, c. 1630-1631, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen – Alte Pinakothek, Munich, CC BY-SA 4.0

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2. Malcolm Cossons: An English Garden at Colipore

Published in 1904, Lady Henry Cooper Eggar’s book An Indian Garden details her struggles and triumphs in creating a garden in the southern Kolkata suburb of Alipore. This paper will explore the story of Lady Eggar’s Garden, its location and her design and planting. I will also examine Lady Eggar’s background and the life she and her family built in India. Finally, I will assess, as much as is possible, the current state of the house and garden.

Giving an intriguing snapshot of life at the zenith of the British Raj, An Indian Garden is one of many such horticultural biographies published at the time. I will seek to place An Indian Garden in context, offering a brief overview of both similar garden memoirs as a phenomenon of Empire and other academic research into English gardens in India.

Malcolm Cossons is a writer and editor focusing on arts and culture, having spent 20 years as editor-in-chief for Sotheby’s auctioneers. For the last decade he has been a freelancer, working with a range of publications and organisations from Christie’s and Dulwich Picture Gallery to The Art Newspaper and The Financial Times. He has also written and edited several publications, from collecting guides for contemporary jewellery and photography, to a children’s book, Dot to Dot (Thames and Hudson, 2013). Malcolm is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.

Image: Lady Eggar and her husband at work in the rose garden of their house at 1 Alipore Lane, detail, An Indian Garden, (p.108), John Murray, 1904

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3. Abby Chandler: Arts and Crafts Gardens in L.M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon Trilogy

Canadian writer L.M. Montgomery is best known as the author of multiple novels including Anne of Green Gables. She was also a passionate gardener who filled her novels with carefully detailed gardens. This paper explores the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement on the gardens in Montgomery's Emily of New Moon trilogy. Examining these gardens in this context highlights the connections between Montgomery’s skills as a reader, a gardener, and as a writer, while making a case for her writings to be considered as a historical source on gardens from the first decades of the twentieth century.

Dr. Abby Chandler is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She is a gardener and a life-long reader of L.M. Montgomery and is writing a book which considers Montgomery’s writings about gardens in context with horticultural movements from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Image: Arts and Crafts style Garden at Stevens-Coolidge House and Garden, ©Abby Chandler

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4. Boryana Ivanova : ‘Ruins of Remembrance’ - War-Damaged Churches and the Making of Memorial Gardens in the City of London

This paper presents original research into the post-war landscape history of three churches damaged during the Blitz in the City of London – St Dunstan-in-the-East, Christ Church Greyfriars, and St Mary Aldermanbury – as they were transformed into public gardens. Despite their prominence in the cityscape, these sites have received little scholarly attention as post-war designed landscapes. Through uncovered archival material and site analysis, this study is the first to critically examine their redevelopment as intentional, if unofficial, memorial gardens to the London Blitz that fuse ruin, planting, and spatial design to achieve a commemorative function.

Boryana Ivanova is a recent graduate of the MSt Building History student at the University of Cambridge where her research examined memorial landscapes, reconstruction, and ruins, all within the context of the post-war period. She is also a Conservation Advisor at Alan Baxter, a Trustee of the London Historic Buildings Trust, and serves on the committees of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies and Future for Religious Heritage.

Image: Christ Church Greyfriars garden, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

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